Ruvido umano

Humanity has its harshness, its violence towards the world. And Mariangela Gualtieri’s new book opens and closes with poems that touch on this roughness. In one poem, we hope that ‘we will improve / we have only been here a short time. / We still don’t understand / and we get too agitated. / We are still at war’. But in the civil poems that close the collection, indignation seems to prevail. Within this framework, however, there is the treasure of the wild, there are signs of the sacred, and above all there is the miracle of silence, in which “Everything is a happy enigma / a voice without a voice. Everything says / yes while it is silent”. Many of these poems are punctuated by the presence of animals, domestic and wild, almost angelic presences, conduits for “penetrating secret things”. But another thread running through the collection is time, an entity that marks us, shapes us, but which sooner or later we “overcome” to reach ‘the whole that rolls / whole. The sumptuous / nothingness of the sky’. More than in her other books, here Mariangela Gualtieri speaks to us of the end, which is the end of individual bodies, the end of “masks”, but also the continuity of life. Modulating her voice between harshness and sweetness, enchantment and disenchantment, hers is an invitation to pay attention and listen to the visible and the invisible.